Madame Matisse's Hat
by Nenena
Summary: Liz still appreciates the beauty of asymmetry. Unfortunately, her partner does not... with one notable exception. Liz/Kid/Patti threesome implied, if you squint.


**Madame Matisse's Hat**

Written for the _Soul Eater _livejournal prompt community, **42_souls**.

Pairing: Kid/Liz/Patti. Prompt: Foiled Again.

Notes: Internet cookies to anyone who can correctly guess the name of the actual museum that they visit in this fic! (Er, not like there's a giant hint toward the end, or anything.)

* * *

"Oooooooooh!" Patti, at least, was properly appreciative. "It looks like an elephant! Kissing a polar bear! With eggplants! On top of that lady's head!"

Liz squinted, hard, trying to see what Patti was seeing. She couldn't see the elephant or the polar bear, but at least she could enjoy the chaotic brush strokes and Matisse's scandalous color combinations on their own merits. "The lady in the picture is Matisse's wife," Liz explained, proud of how smart she sounded. "Her name was Amelie. Actually, when Matisse first showed this painting at the Salon d'Autumne, Vauxcelles said that it—Oh, come on. Kid, why do you have your eyes closed?!"

"I shouldn't have to explain why."

"You promised me that you would at least _look _at it!"

"I _did _look. It's hideous, by the way."

"How can you say that? This is Matisse's _Femme au Chapeau_!" Liz paused for a moment, savoring the way that the elegant French syllables rolled off her tongue. But then her annoyance and frustration came back with a vengeance. "This is, like, the only real Matisse that I've ever seen. You could at least try to be a little bit less disrespectful."

"Who's being disrespectful?"

"You are. Standing in front of an original Matisse with your freakin' eyes closed."

He risked partially opening one eye to squint at her. "Since when did you care so much about art?"

"Since I moved into a house full of it and realized that everything on your walls _sucked._" Liz sniffed. "You really do have no taste." Kid didn't like anyartwork that wasn't monotone and symmetrical.

But Liz had always liked art. She had a fine eye for color and shape. That was largely the reason why she cared so much about fashion, always dressing herself to convey both aesthete and meaning. And much as her taste in fashion, she preferred artwork that was loud, colorful, and brash. She loved the chaos and audacity of Pollock, the rainbow clutter of Klee, the dizzying bubblegum-colored geometry of Noyed.

Admittedly, though, quite a lot of contemporary art scared her, the same way that Madam Matisse's hat scared Kid. Liz didn't care for anything that looked _too _creepy, or that looked too much like real ghosts and monsters. Even Chagall sometimes gave her shudders. _The Fiddler _looked rather disturbingly like a particularly nasty soul that she and Kid had dispatched on a mission two weeks previously. She found it hard enough to deal with creepy crawlies in her real life, and art was supposed to be a refuge from that. That was why she pretended to disdain the Surrealists for purely art snobbery-related reasons, although the truth was, she simply couldn't look at Dali's melting clocks without having nightmares for weeks.

There was one thing Dali _had _created, however, that Liz was dying to see.

Liz led her two companions through the museum, pausing in front of Rauschenberg's _Collection. _"Ooooooh, it looks like paint barf!" Patti exclaimed happily. Kid, in contrast, actually made a strangled noise in the back of his throat and clamped his hands over his eyes.

When he refused to remove his hands, Liz took him by the shoulders and marched him, blind and trembling, through the rest of the collection. The stopped in front of Warhol's _Red Liz. _"Blech," Patti said. She looked up at her sister. "You're way prettier."

"Thanks, Patti." She wrapped her arms around Kid's shoulders. "Are you okay?"

"Totally fine," he said. Of course, he still had his hands clamped over his eyes, and his breathing was quick and nervous. "I'm fine," he repeated, unconvincingly.

Liz knew that he was _not _fine, but he was trying his damndest to _be _fine for her sake. It was sweet, in a way – but also kind of infuriating.

The outside world was full of landmines, Liz had discovered early on in her partnership with Kid. There were hidden obstacles everywhere, dark spots of asymmetry that went unnoticed until Kid stumbled across them and had a neurotic explosion. A disorderly garden in front of somebody's house, incorrect place settings at a restaurant, or an uneven number of seats in a movie theater. It made the simple act of attempting to _go out_ and _have fun_ a much more trying ordeal than by any rights it should have been. And when Liz occasionally got the foolish idea in her head that she wanted to go somewhere that she _knew _would be full of landmines – like, say, a museum of modern artwork – she knew that she had to be ready to deal with the consequences of that decision, however disastrous they might be.

Liz steered Kid out of the gallery and into an expansive lobby. She sat him down on a bench, and Patti sat down beside her. "There's just one more thing here that I want to see," Liz told him. "It's a Dali sculpture."

His face went pale. "Dali? The melting clocks guy?!"

"Oh, I don't like this melting clocks thing, either. But this is different. It's a sculpture. _Gala's Shoe._ Will you at least try to _look _at it?"

"Depends. Tell me about this shoe thing."

"Well… It's a red shoe, with stuff on it."

"It's just one shoe?"

"Just one."

"And is the 'stuff' arranged asymmetrically?"

"Duh."

He frowned. "I don't get it. How can you like this crap?"

Liz tapped at her chin thoughtfully, struggling to find the words to answer Kid's question. Liz liked the chaos of modern art because she _needed _chaos in her life. Always had and always would. And of course, living with Kid made keeping in touch with her inner anarchy a challenge. But that hadn't stopped her from hanging Frank Stella and Philip Noyed prints all over a few select rooms in Kid's house. Liz figured that decorating with Stella was probably a healthier outlet for her wild side than stealing cars and mugging people had been.

To Liz, the colorful rage splashed across a Pollock canvas was appealing on a primal, wordless level. It also reminded her of the loud, angry, brightly-colored fashion statements featured in the glossy magazines that she liked to thumb through as a way of de-stressing after a particularly difficult day. Pollock's paint splatters, and a supermodel's deliberately ripped sweater and smeared makeup, were two sides of the same visual coin. Every modern artist that Liz preferred was like that – painters of fashion. And on the other hand altogether, Liz adored artists like Matisse, who literally had painted the fashion magazine spreads of their day, but in their own chaotic, subverted way.

Liz wasn't exactly well-educated on the subject of contemporary art. She didn't know and didn't care about the difference between Expressionism, Post-Surrealism, or Synthetic Cubism. Useless terms like that just made her head spin. But she did, as the old saying went, know exactly what she liked. And she liked bright, colorful chaos.

But instead of answering Kid's question, Liz tossed one of her own back at him. "_I_ don't get it," she said. "You're not afraid of witches or werewolves or _me, _but you're too terrified to look at a measly little Matisse for more than a few seconds?"

"Yes," he said. "I will be seeing Madam Matisse's hat in my nightmares for years to come. Thank you for that, by the way."

Liz stared at him. "Wow. Was that _sarcasm_ I just heard?"

He clapped his hand over his mouth. "This is all your fault," he said. "You're a terrible linguistic influence."

"Come on!" Patti said, jumping up and grabbing at her sister's arm. "I wanna see the shoe thingy!"

Liz turned toward Kid, then froze when she saw where his eyes were looking. There was a restaurant on the far end of the lobby, fronted by a cluttered mass of several small tables and many, many chairs. Kid's lips were moving, his fingers tapping against his knees, his eyes fixated on the distant chairs. He was counting. Uh-oh.

Liz realized that all of the compulsions that Kid had been suppressing for the past hour were about to be unleashed in an explosion of furniture re-arrangement.

Kid stood up, suddenly. He was already stepping away from the bench. "Excuse me for a moment," he said. "There aren't the same number of chairs at all of the tables over there. I should--"

Liz grabbed at his wrist and pulled him back toward the bench. "_Don't--_"

"But the tables don't have the same number of chairs."

Liz squeezed his wrist as hard and as angrily as she could. "Don't you dare," she said. "You've already embarrassed me enough today. Just once – just for _once – _I'd like us to be able to go out and do something _classy _without you having a total freakout about whatever. Is that too much to ask?"

"I'm not going to embarrass you," he said, defensively. "I just want to fix the chairs. Is that wrong?"

"Yes because they're not _your _chairs and because it doesn't _matter._"

He wasn't going to back down though. He never did. Liz could see that in his eyes. "Are you going to let go of my hand?" he asked Liz, his face darkening.

Patti was laughing at them already. But Liz wasn't beaten yet. She turned to Patti and said two words: "Secret weapon."

Patti scratched her head. "What?"

"Secret weapon, Patti, it's time for the secret weapon!"

"Oh! Right!" Patti reached into her purse and pulled out the only item inside: a rubik's cube. Cheap plastic, brightly painted, and its sides were already quite well-shuffled. Patti had well and thoroughly messed up the cube herself that morning. "Here," she said, handing the toy to Kid.

"What is this?"

"You have to fix it so that all of the sides are the same color. It's really hard to do."

He glared at her, then at Liz. "I'm not a dog, you know. You can't distract me with a squeaky toy."

"Fine. All right." But Liz was grinning at him smugly. "If you don't want it, give it back to Patti."

"I will. I am going to give this back to Patti."

"All right. Then do it."

"I'm totally going to."

"Go ahead."

Liz watched Kid frowning down at the toy as he worked it with his deft, slender fingers. "I will in a minute," he said.

They walked together toward Dali's shoe, in comfortable silence. Kid paid more attention to the puzzle in his hands than to the shoe, when they finally saw it. But he did manage to look at the shoe for all of four whole seconds. "It's a spoon and some tea candles glued to a shoe," he said, dismissively. "This is art, now?" Instead of waiting for a reply to his rhetorical question, Kid turned his attention back to his toy.

Liz led them back to the front lobby. "Okay," she said. Steeling herself. "I'm going to buy a print. Just one."

"I'm not going to stop you," Kid said, speaking to her even as his fingers continued to work on his puzzle. He seemed much calmer now that he had something for his mind to fixate on. "As long as you put it up in one of the designated rooms." By which he meant the rooms that Liz had chosen to re-decorate and that he himself subsequently avoided at all costs.

"Yeah, about that. Uh… I want to put something up somewhere else."

Kid's fingers froze. " 'Somewhere else' meaning…?"

"Some place where we can all enjoy it. Like the front entryway. Or the dining room. Or someplace."

His fingers tapped nervously against the sides of his plastic cube. "Are you serious?"

"Very." He was finally looking up at her now, so Liz stared him straight in the eye. "Remember when you told Patti and I that it was _our _house, too?"

"I remember," he said, reluctantly.

"Okay. So. If you were being serious – if you're still serious, that is – then we can make compromises about the home décor like mature, responsible adults. And besides," she added, "having a little asymmetry around the home will be good for you. Haven't you ever heard of 'exposure therapy'?"

"Liz, I know what exposure therapy is." He frowned down at the puzzle in his hands again. "I get plenty of that every day just from standing in the immediate vicinity of Black Star's hair. I don't need any more."

"Fine, then. If you won't do it for yourself, then do it for me."

"And Patti!" Patti added.

"Yeah, and Patti."

He sighed. "I guess I can't say no to that."

"Of course you can't." She leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. "Thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For coming with me here today. And for letting me mess with the house." Liz actually was touched by the fact that he had been willing to follow her into a museum of modern artwork in the first place. Granted, he had failed miserably, as far as being able to mentally and emotionally handle the simple task of walking from painting to painting had gone. But Liz still appreciated the fact that at least he had tried. And now he was even going to let her start making her mark upon the interior decoration of their house. If that wasn't love, then Liz didn't know what was.

The entered the museum gift shop. Kid carefully averted his eyes from everything mounted on the walls and displayed on the shelves, concentrating his full attention on the soothing task of trying to solve the plastic puzzle in his hands. Liz let Patti drag her around from display to display, taking in the sights. Suddenly, Patti shouted and grabbed at her sister's arm. "That one! That one!" She pointed frantically. "We have to get that one!" She was pointing to a poster print of Frank Stella's _The Duel._

Liz hesitated, torn. She had actually been thinking of buying a copy of _Femme au Chapeau, _one of which was conveniently displayed on the other side of the store_. _She had already decided upon the perfect place to hang it, too. But _The Duel _was undeniably eye-catching, with its bright neon colors and shameless abuse of geometric patterns. "Patti," Liz said, "what about the picture of the lady with the hat?"

"Oh, I like that one," Patti said. "But I like this one too."

"So get both," Kid said, clicking the last piece of the rubick's cube puzzle in place and handing the toy back to Patti. "They're posters, so they're the same size, right?" He held up two fingers. "So we can hang two. One on each side of the entryway."

"It still won't be symmetrical," Liz warned him.

"It'll be close enough for me. As long as I'm not looking at them."

Liz smirked at him. "One of these days, you know, you _are _going to grow to like them." She shrugged. "You can't walk in front of a Matisse every day and _not _have it grow on you."

"I kind of think that I can." He turned away from her, trying to avert his gaze from the display of Picasso postcards immediately to her left. His fingers drummed against his thigh. He was tic-ing again, building up toward another explosion.

Liz restrained herself from intervening, just for a moment, watching to see what he would do. Kid did not disappoint. He walked over toward a shelf full of glossy, hardcover art books and reached for one. The re-arrangement of the entire five-tiered shelf was imminent. Liz figured that she had better do something about that. She didn't want them to get kicked out of the store before she'd had the chance to buy her posters. "_Patti,_" Liz hissed.

"Aye-aye!" Patti saluted, then immediately set to work unsolving the rubick's cube again. Her fingers flew across it, wrecking all of the work that Kid had done, pulling apart the uniform sides of the cube and re-painting each surface with her own particular brand of colorful chaos. She laughed, probably because it was fun. When the cube was well and thoroughly messed up again, Patti tapped Kid on the shoulder and handed it back to him. He took the cube in his hands and began correcting it again, forgetting all about the bookshelf in an instant. With something to concentrate on, he immediately seemed back in control of himself.

They paid for their posters and left the museum together. Liz carried the rolled-up posters proudly in her arms as she led Patti and Kid down a broad, busy street. Then something in a store window caught the corner of her eye. She turned her head, and saw a wall of television sets, facing the street, displaying news footage of snarled traffic downtown and the smoking wreckage of the Golden Gate Bridge that was the source of the delays. She winced at the sight of their own handiwork being broadcast on what appeared to be a national news channel.

"Ooooooh, we're gonna be in so much trouble when we get back," Patti said, having spotted the television screens. "Sooooo much trouble!"

"Oh well. Whatever," Liz said. She didn't care if Kid's father reprimanded them in his decidedly non-threatening way, or even if he confiscated the souls that she and Patti had eaten. Those particular souls hadn't even tasted that great, anyway. What did matter, to Liz, was the strange and unshakeable feeling that despite everything – despite the destroyed bridge, the lingering horror of the fight, and the rather bland-tasting souls that had been her and sister's only rewards – she still felt, somehow, as if the mission had been a complete triumph.

And that wasn't _just _because she'd finally gotten to see real, genuine Matisse original.

Liz turned toward Kid, suddenly afraid that she would find him kneeling on the ground and beating at his own head, like he had last night after the bridge had collapsed. Blaming himself, as usual. But, amazingly, Kid wasn't making with his usual display of histrionic self-loathing. Instead, he was standing beside Patti, calm and cool as ice, his concentration still focused on the plastic toy in his hands. He was most pointedly ignoring the television screens blaring at them.

He apparently noticed her staring at him. With what seemed like a great effort, he tore his eyes away from the rubick's cube and looked up, meeting her gaze. "What?"

"I was just wondering," she said. "If you really won't ever like the Matisse."

"Why should I? It's hideous."

"Why is it hideous?"

"It's asymmetrical."

"So just because something is asymmetrical, it can't be beautiful?"

"Absolutely not," he said, sternly. "That's not true. I never said that."

"Oh _really, _now."

"I mean it." There was something unreadable but undeniably intense in his steady, unwavering gaze. "I swear. The two most beautiful souls that I've ever seen are completely asymmetrical."

Liz suddenly felt her voice die in her throat. Even Patti stared at Kid and didn't laugh.

"But that painting is still hideous," Kid continued, a bit too quickly. "I mean, seriously, Liz. That poor woman has green skin. And her _hat_…" He made a face. "And the less said about the Stella, the better."

Liz finally recovered her voice. She even managed to sniff haughtily. "Like you would know," she said. "I don't have to listen to the opinion of someone who thinks that two strokes of bad fakey-Chinese calligraphy on a white square canvas is the height of artistic awesome."

"Fine then. You don't have to look at my paintings, and I don't have to look at your paintings, and then we can all be happy," Kid said.

Liz grinned at him. "Mutual artistic loathing?"

"_Balance, _Liz. This is also a type of balance."

"You mean 'compromise.'"

"They're kind of the same thing."

"Yay! We're balanced!" Patti threw her arms into the air. "Whoo-hoo! Balance!"

Liz glanced down at the rolled posters in her arms, and thought of Madam Matisse's hat, hidden within the layers of coiled glossy paper like a fashion disaster waiting to strike. The idea of such a beautifully monstrous creation restoring balance to her home pleased Liz to no end. It was a kind of delicious irony. And yet it made perfect sense.

After all, symmetry was only beautiful because asymmetry existed in the first place.

"Come on. Let's go," Kid said, still playing with his puzzle even as he walked out in front of Liz. "Frankly, I'd prefer to get out of the city, before anybody around here figures out that we had anything to do with that poor bridge." He sniffed. "Poor bridge. It was so beautifully symmetrical."


End file.
